By the aid of faith we never find any thing to condemn in the conduct of those, whom we have been accustomed to regard as saints; their obstinacy, seditious spirit, pride, even their ferocity, are justified, by saying that they are animated with a holy zeal. In a word, a saint may violate with impunity, the most sacred rules of morality, without his bigoted admirers permitting themselves to criticise his conduct. Saints have always been in the habit of terming those chastisements, which they have drawn upon themselves (oftentimes justly) by their unruly passions or indiscreet zeal, persecution. Those whom a devout phrensy excites to tumult and disorder are honoured as confessors and martyrs, and we find the Jews and Pagans were the most unjust and cruel of men, for having treated the Christians, whom they could not consider but as disturbers of the public peace, in the same manner as the Christians now treat the Jews, heretics, and infidels. Bigots, accustom themselves to regard their saints as irreproachable characters, or if they cannot justify their conduct, they say that God has permitted them to sin, to humiliate them, in order that he might have an opportunity of pardoning them. It is thus that every good Christian regards a brigand in revolt against his legitimate sovereign, an usurper, a monster of cruelty, an infamous adulterer, an assassin, in a word, a David, as a great saint; or even by excellence, as the man after God's own heart! Faith in the mind of a bigot, is able to reverse, even the most simple rules of morality and virtue. Religion encourages the most perverse men to give themselves up to the blackest crimes, the most shameful vices, and the most shocking irregularities, by setting before them the examples of scoundrels, who were nevertheless the friends of God. It cannot be pretended that St. Paul of whom we are now speaking, was guilty of excesses, similar to those committed by the king of the Jews, whose whole history is a series of horrors: but without faith it is difficult to consider our Apostle as an irreproachable character; though the historian, whoever he be, to whom we are indebted for the Acts of the Apostles, has designed to hold him up as a model of virtue, we find that by a singular oversight he did not seem aware, that he made him tell an untruth in public, and in the most solemn manner in presence of the Sanhedrim or great council of the Jews. In fact as we have already remarked, perceiving that his audience was composed of Sadducees and Pharisees, with the view of dividing them and gaining friends, Paul cried out that he was a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee, and that they sought to kill him, because of his hope in the resurrection.